Lady Mary's Lone Survivor Recounts Sinking
Man clung to wooden plank until rescue copter arrived
U.S. Coast Guard
The fishing vessel Lady Mary (far left) sits moored in Cape May Harbor in 2004.
"The boat was running, but it seemed to be at a standstill," said the lone survivor of the tragic Lady Mary boat sinking.
Talking through a translator, Jose Arias Pena gave his account of that fateful March day to investigators Tuesday.
Officials are still searching for clues as to why the 71-foot fishing trawler sank to the bottom of the Atlantic.
"Come on Jose, the boat down, the boat down!" is what one of Pena's crewmates shouted to him as scallop boat began to sink.
Seven men went into the rough water 60 miles off Cape May's coast on March 24. Pena was the only survivor.
He clung to an 8-foot long wooden plank until rescuers arrived two hours later.
Pena's testimony shed some light on what happened in the minutes before the Lady Mary went down – most notably that the boat was damaged.
"There's some damage to the vessel…and whether that damage was caused by a collision or caused by an entanglement or the vessel striking the bottom, we don't know yet," the boat owner's attorney Stevenson Weeks told NBC10's Ted Greenberg.
Of the six men who died in the accident, four were recovered and two were lost to the sea.
Toxicology results showed the captain and his brother had marijuana in their systems at the time of the sinking. Investigators are not sure when they used the drug or if it affected them at the time of the sinking.
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